La Presa di Roma is supposed by some to be Italy's first dramatic film. More certainly it is Italy's first film with a map, and is the earliest film I have found from any country where a map is opened up, pointed at, discussed and then folded away.
We can't make out the map itself, but I suppose General Carchidio has brought a map of Rome on which to point out to General Kanzler the Papal Army's defensive weaknesses, as he urges him to surrender. (See here for a discussion of other early maps in films.) ‘Surveillance - the controlling view of the city from above, as seen on a map, or from a distance, as through a camera lens – is the key to Bergmann's particular form of power, but also its limitation. As Peter Brunette has pointed out, his power of surveillance is a directfunction of his distance from the city at street level. He views it from above, he knows it through maps and photographs (cameras are like extensions of his eyes), through his agents and spies, like Ingrid, and through the collaboration of the Fascist police, who have local knowledge and intelligence networks of their own that he can tap into.'
David Forgacs, ‘Space, Rhetoric and the Divided City in Roma Città Aperta, in Sidney Gottlieb (ed.), Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.113. |
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